‘Combatant in Chief’: The UFC’s Shameless Trump Plug

Post navigation

“Combatant in Chief,” the most recent entry to the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s “25 Years in Short” documentary series, begins with a series of brief clips of Donald Trump from the 1980s and 1990s. In one, he is confidently striding through one of his casinos, shaking hands with its patrons. In another, he looks wistfully out of a Trump-branded helicopter window. UFC President Dana White is the narrator: “Donald Trump is a visionary. This guy’s a fighter, an entrepreneur … he’s a guy you don’t want to bet against.”

The video then cuts to footage of White — on a baseball field, in the audience at a UFC event, looking schmick in a tuxedo and magniloquently endorsing Trump for president at the Republican National Convention. The opening montage ends with a sound bite from a Trump rally: “I will fight for you and I will win for you,” bellows the then-candidate. It then launches into a largely aggrandizing account of Trump’s involvement in professional boxing.